Problems with to many indexed pages
-
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links.
Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out.
Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories.
I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index?
The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
-
Great! Please let us know how it goes so we can all learn more about it.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for that! What you are saying makes sense, so I'm going to go ahead and give it a try.
-
"Google: Do Not No Index Pages With Rel Canonical Tags"
https://www.seroundtable.com/noindex-canonical-google-18274.htmlThis is still being debated by people and I'm not saying it is "definitely" your problem. But if you're trying to figure out why those noindexed pages aren't coming out of the index this could be one thing to look into.
John Mueller (see screenshot below) is a Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google.
Good luck.
-
Isn't the whole point of using canonical to give Google a pointer of what page it is originally meant to be?
So if you have a category on shop.com/sub..
Using filter and/or pagenation you then get:
shop.com/sub?p=1
shop.com/sub?color=blue.. and so on! Both those pages then need canonical and neither do we want them index, so we by using both canonical and noindex tell Google to "don't index this page (noindex), here is the original version of it (canonical)".
Or did I misunderstand something?
-
Hello Inevo,
Most of the time when this happens it's just because Google hasn't gotten around to recrawling the pages and updating their index after seeing the new robots meta tag. It can take several months for this to happen on a large site. Submit an XML sitemap and/or create an HTML sitemap that makes it easy for them to get to these pages if you need it to go faster.
I had a look and see some conflicting instructions that Google could possibly be having a problem with.
The paginated version ( e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft?p=2 ) of the page has a rel canonical tag pointing to the first page (e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft/ ). Yet it also has a noindex tag while the canonical page has an index tag. And each page has its own unique title (Side 2 ... Side 3 | ...) . I would remove the rel canonical tag on the paginated pages since they probably don't have any pagerank worth giving to the canonical page. This way it is even more clear to Google that the canonical page is to be indexed, and the others are not to be - instead of saying they are the same page. The same is true of filter pages: http://www.vita.no/gavesett/herre/filter/price-400-/ .
I don't know if that has anything to do with your issue of index bloat, but it's worth a try. I did find some paginated pages in the index.
There also appears to be about 520 blog tag pages indexed. I typically set those to be noindex,follow.
Also remove all paginated pages and any other page that you don't want indexed from your XML sitemaps if you haven't already.
At least for the filter pages, since /filter/ is its own directory, you can use the URL removal tool in GWT. It does have a directory-level removal feature. Of course there are only 75 of these indexed at this moment.
-
My advice would be to include a fresh sitemap and upload it Google Webmaster tool. Not sure about time but I will second Donna, this will take time for the pages to get out of the Google Index.
There is one hack that I used for one page on my website but not sure if it will work for 1000+ pages.
I actually removed a page on my website using Google’s temporary removal request. It kicked the page out of the index for 90 days and in the mean time I added the link in the robots.txt file so it gone quickly and never returned back in the Google listing.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi lnevo,
I had a similar situation last year and am not aware of a faster way to get pages deindexed. You're feeding WMT an updated sitemap right?
It took 8 months for the excess pages to get dropped off my client's site. I'll be listening to hear if anyone knows a faster way.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages not indexed
Hey everyone Despite doing the necessary checks, we have this problem that only a part of the sitemap is indexed.
Technical SEO | | conversal
We don't understand why this indexation doesn't want to take place. The major problem is that only a part of the sitemap is indexed. For a client we have several projects on the website with several subpages, but only a few of these subpages are indexed. Each project has 5 to 6 subpages. They all should be indexed. Project: https://www.brody.be/nl/nieuwbouwprojecten/nieuwbouw-eeklo/te-koop-eeklo/ Mainly subelements of the page are indexed: https://www.google.be/search?source=hp&ei=gZT1Wv2ANouX6ASC5K-4Bw&q=site%3Abrody.be%2Fnl%2Fnieuwbouwprojecten%2Fnieuwbouw-eeklo%2F&oq=site%3Abrody.be%2Fnl%2Fnieuwbouwprojecten%2Fnieuwbouw-eeklo%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...30.11088.0.11726.16.13.1.0.0.0.170.1112.8j3.11.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..4.6.693.0..0j0i131k1.0.p6DjqM3iJY0 Do you have any idea what is going wrong here?
Thanks for your advice! Frederik
Digital marketeer at Conversal0 -
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
Indexing Problem
My URL is: www.memovalley.comWe have submitted our sitemap last month and we are having issues seeing our URLs listed in the search results. Even though our sitemaps contain over 200 URLs, we only currently only have 7 listed (excluding blog.memovalley.com).Can someone help us with this? | |
Technical SEO | | Memovalley
| | | | It looks like Googlebot has timed out, at least once, for one of our URLs. Why is Googlebot timing out? My server is located at Amazon WS, in North Carolina and it is a small instance. Could Google be querying multiple URLs at the same time and jamming my servers? Could it be becauseThanks for your help!0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic indicates duplicate page content for home page?
My first SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic report for my website indicates duplicate page content for my home page. It lists the home page URL Page Title and URL twice. How do I go about diagnosing this? Is the problem related to the following code that is in my .htaccess file? (The purpose of the code was to redirect any non "www" backlink referrals to the "www" version of the domain.) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whatever.com [NC]
Technical SEO | | Linesides
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.whatever.com/$1 [L,R=301] Should I get rid of the "http" reference in the second line? Related to this is a notice in the "Crawl Notices Found" -- "301 Permanent redirect" which shows my home page title as "http://whatever.com" and shows the redirect address as http://http://www.whatever.com/ I'm guessing this problem is again related to the redirect code I'm using. Also... The report indicates duplicate content for those links that have different parameters added to the URL i.e. http://www.whatever.com?marker=Blah Blah&markerzoom=13 If I set up a canonical reference for the page, will this fix this? Thank you.0 -
I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages?
I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages? My site is 7 years old. But there are only about 3,500 pages being crawled.
Technical SEO | | Ishimoto0 -
Remove Deleted (but indexed) Pages Through Webmaster Tools?
I run a blog/directory site. Recently, I changed directory software and, as a result, Google is showing 404 Not Found crawling errors for about 750 non-existent pages. I've had some suggest that I should implement a 301 redirect, but can't see the wisdom in this as the pages are obscure, unlikely to appear in search and they've been deleted. Is the best course to simply manually enter each 404 error page in to the Remove Page option in Webmaster Tools? Will entering deleted pages into the Removal area hurt other healthy pages on my site?
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
Some site pages are removed from Google Index
Hello, Some pages of my clients website are removed from Google Index. We were in top 10 position for some keywords but now I cannot find those pages neither in top 1000. Any idea what to do in order to get these pages back? thank you
Technical SEO | | besartbajrami0